Tag: Consumerism

A Link Between Consumerism & Nationalism

A Link Between Consumerism & Nationalism

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that consumerism and nationalism are linked through their shared status as imagined communities. Harari defines an imagined community as “a community of people who don’t really know each other, but imagine that they do.” In a market, we don’t know every producer or every other consumer. The actions of all the other producers and consumers impact us, and we may have niche markets that we are intimately tied to, but we don’t really know many other people in the market. In a nation, we may know a handful of people very closely, another handful of people well, and have a handful of acquaintances, but we certainly don’t know everyone. Nevertheless, we can act as though we know everyone in a community of gym enthusiasts, sneakerheads, or real estate investors. We can feel a unity and connection with all 330 million Americans, all citizens in the Deep South, or everyone living in our city. But these communities are imagined, we don’t really know everyone and don’t actually live in community with them.
 
 
Regarding consumerism and nationalism Harari continues, “both are imagined communities because it is impossible for all customers in a market or for all members of a nation to really know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past.” Even if they are not really real, these imagined communities exist for a reason. They help us cooperate and coordinate among huge numbers of humans. “consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests, and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination.”
 
 
This imagination helps us connect with people we otherwise wouldn’t have a reason to connect with. It helps us trust people we otherwise wouldn’t have a reason to trust. It can go too far and lead us to purchase shoes for thousands of dollars or to die in wars started by the megalomania of a charismatic leader. But in general, consumerism and nationalism have become a foundation for large scale human cooperation in the modern era. We hide the fact that these communities are imagined and the better we do the better we can participate with the other members of our imagined community. It can give us a sense of purpose and meaning in interacting and living among other people, even if it is all based on shared myth.
A Few Dominant Myths

A Few Dominant Myths

Posted on by jabittan
“Friends giving advice often tell each other, follow your heart. But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens. What we want, what we believe is possible for us, and how we experience the world is often dominated by the larger culture that we are a part of. This means that how we relate to and understand the world is constantly changing both through our own lifetimes and across the lifetimes of individuals of our entire species. What we believe, what we think is good and worthy of our time and energy, and how we go about pursuing our goals and desires changes based on the dominant myths of our time and the resources available to us.
 
 
To demonstrate this point, Harari shows how two myths, Romanticism and Consumerism can be found in the idea of follow your heart. Regarding Romanticism, Harari writes, “Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different human experiences as we can.” The value of being human, within this framework, is the experience of being alive. Doing the same thing each day, becoming really good at one particular thing, living in the same spot, and having a few consistent experiences each day is not valuable. Uniqueness, openness, and diversity are praised within the individual.
 
 
Regarding Consumerism, Harari writes, “Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product.” Within this view, things, possessions, and services are of inherent value, as is owning things and consuming services. A lack of possessions is seen as failure, and the goal is to continually obtain more, bigger, and better possessions.
 
 
It is easy to see why Harari is able to lump these two myths together. Being unique compliments buying lots of different things. Having many varied possessions, purchasing many varied services, and utilizing possessions to engage in new and diverse activities tie Romantic ideas of the individual pursuing a diverse and exciting lifestyle with the consumerism urge to possess and own things and experiences. “Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism,” Harari writes.
 
 
But there is no reason that our culture needs to favor these two myths over others. It is nice to have a diversity of experiences. It can be helpful to see and view the world from different perspectives and to understand how others live and the full potential of humanity. It is also nice to be able to purchase comforts, and a helpful byproduct of consumerism is an advancing technological landscape that rewards innovations which improve life satisfaction. But Humans can be satisfied in life with a few possessions. We can be satisfied with a stable and predictable routine. We can find joy in becoming very good at doing the same things each day and mastering those tasks. There is no reason that Romanticism or Consumerism has to be understood as better than Stoicism or Minimalism, or any other myth that we might adopt. Within the United States, few of us truly challenge the ideas of Romanticism or Consumerism. They are the dominant myths of the day, and eschewing them is strange. Even when we do try to give up one myth, it is hard to give up both. Deciding not to purchase many products and services is seen as a way of being unique and self-sufficient, a Romantic framing of non-Consumerist behavior. Minimalism often still rewards carefully curated purchases and possessions. If you are not going to have a lot of things, then you better have the absolute best of the few things you do have, many Minimalists might argue.
 
 
How we understand ourselves, the values we pursue, and how we exist in culture is often determined by myths that work well when we all embrace them in a collective manner. That doesn’t mean that one myth is inherently better than another. Additionally, myths can be complimentary to each other, and even contradictory myths can be understood as complimentary and not conflicting. We do not exist in isolation or in a vacuum, and it shows in the ways in which cultural myths influence us. Follow your heart is a message to tap into the dominant myths of the day, and it is a saying that is influenced by those same myths.
Excesses and Externalities

The Problem with our Excesses

Posted on by jabittan
My previous post was about our desires to live a life that never involves any pain or suffering. We try to build a life for ourselves and our loved ones where every moment is happy, and where we never have to engage in drudgery, never experience physical discomfort, and never face any obstacles. Today’s post looks at another related aspect of our lives and mindsets that Sam Quinones highlights in his book Dreamland as part of our current opioid crisis: excesses.

 

Quinones is critical of our capitalistic culture that creates a message of buying things to find happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. The marketing departments of everything from soap companies, life insurance companies, to take-out restaurants suggests that happiness is right around the corner, as long as we are willing and able to buy more of what they offer. It is owning something bigger, having more, and expanding our consumption that is branded as a good life. But as Quinones sees it, “Excess contaminated the best of America.”

 

I studied public policy and I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts with economists. A common idea in the world of public policy and the mind of economists is the idea of externalities, secondary consequences of policies and peoples actions. Some externalities are positive, such as people developing a sense of civic pride after participating in an election, but many externalities are negative, such as green house gasses polluting the planet as we drive to and from work. What Quinones describes with the quote above, is the reality that our drive for excesses produces negative externalities that damage our planet and ultimately ruin the lifestyle that we chase.

 

By always wanting more, wanting it faster, and wanting it more tailored to our specific desires to make us feel like royalty, we have put ourselves in a place that is unsustainable. Our single use plastic bags have trashed our cities and open spaces. Having our individual cars to drive to everyplace we want to go emits more pollution than a well developed public transportation infrastructure. Over-purchasing consumer goods produces more garbage that has to go someplace.

 

This post has simply highlighted the reality that we live with negative externalities, and that our consumer driven culture is creating externalities which poison the planet. Quinones throughout his book focuses on the idea that our culture’s excesses have fueled the opioid epidemic by turning us inward toward our own wants versus encouraging us to think of others and how we can work together as part of a community. I think he is correct, and I think the space to start in making a change is by getting people to truly reflect on their lives, their purchases, and what they pursue. As Ryan Holiday put it in Stillness is the Key, “Eventually one has to say the e-word, enough. or the world says it for you.”

 

The way out of our opioid crisis, and indeed the way out of so many of our problems today, is to say enough to our own selfish desires. We need to stop the negative externalities that we produce when we purely pursue our own selfish ends, and instead we need to embrace our communities and put others first, to create more positive externalities which can heal our communities and fill the empty holes that consumerism leaves inside of us.